Some of you might consider yourself in love and find it impossible to know that you still have to learn a lot about love. At the teenage level, love and dating are often confused with seemingly similar concepts of infatuation and lust. However, all of these are quite different from each other and only a clear understanding of each can help you determine if you are actually in true love with someone.

While lust stands more in terms of getting sexually attracted to someone, infatuation occurs when you idealize a person and consider him or her to be taking over your entire world. Moreover, lust and infatuation are more likely to occur when you are not quite familiar about the person and wish to know about him/her.

On the other hand, love happens when there is a mutual consent of feelings as well as actions. In teen love and teen dating, definitions of love arise out of all the thoughts and feelings that had been experienced in the person’s childhood and the way love is expressed is mostly influenced by his/her interactions with family and friends.

Every love and dating relationship mostly involves a combination of positive feelings such as happiness, joy, excitement, and exhilaration, as well as negative feelings such as jealousy, insecurity, nervousness, anxiety, anger, and frustration. In most cases of true love, the good feelings outweigh the bad ones. However, remember that you are a teen and that your dating relationships will often be accompanied by negative feelings so you can learn from them in your journey of finding your true soul mate in life.

Make sure to save some time to spend with your partner but most essentially, do not forget to set aside time for yourself as well. This becomes a matter requiring utmost consideration, especially in teen love and teen dating, since lovers at this stage in life often identify so much with their significant other that they forget to follow their own set path in life. Setting aside time for yourself is crucial in ensuring your complete self-analysis and self-development to avoid getting swallowed up by your partner’s identity.